Raphael Samuel is writing as a bourgeois historian who has fully accepted and endorsed the capitalist status quo, but who maintains a ‘nostalgia’ for what he considers a lost past. Samuel seeks to draw the reader into this inverted would of bourgeois illogicality whereby what he thinks about the CPGB (and International Communism) is the only viewpoint of the world worth having.

It is a peculiar fact that the Labour Government of 1945 – which would introduce a Welfare State and National Health System (NHS), would also apply the far-right racist policy of rounding-up and deporting over a thousand Chinese people living in London (due to a sense of xenophobia and racist euphoria that had swept the land following the victory over Hitler), and ‘ban’ the Communist Party of Great Britain marching for workers’ rights on May Day 1947, and 1948.

In such a society, scientists and manufacturers are not motivated by monetary profit, but rather through the very real idea that each innovation is relieving human (and animal) suffering, and as such is collectively ‘progressing’ humanity forward in its positive development and evolution.